Star Wars

The stars are twinkling over Nevada’s Yucca Mountain — movie stars and pop stars, that is. In the battle over the Bush administration’s proposal to bury high-level radioactive waste below the mountain, the glitterati are siding against the president. Barbra Streisand, Bonnie Raitt, Martin Sheen, Melissa Gilbert, Tim Robbins, Alec Baldwin, Morgan Freeman — the cast of characters assembled in opposition to the Yucca Mountain project reads like the credit sequence of a blockbuster. David Blee, a Reagan-era Energy Department official and a current PR consultant to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce (which supports the project) acknowledged ruefully that, “There is no Charlton Heston on our side.” But the pro-Yucca Mountain side does have the support of plenty of senators who would rather see the nuclear waste in someone else’s backyard — and all things considered, the politicos are probably more powerful than the culture gods and goddesses.